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Letter to Lewis 8/6/10

Hello, beautiful.

How's Turkey? I don't have a good imaginative handle on it. I imagine dusty streets, and smooth-skinned men with black goatees tending canopied market stalls full of colourful tiles and relics and rugs. How far off am I? Many miles, I expect.

I can imagine your Mum with more confidence, and I like imagining her. I can imagine she makes the place her own more readily there than in Korea. I don't know why I think that. What is it like for you, to meet her in this different context? Does it change the mode of your relating, at all?
Will you give her my love and tell her I went and bought a mandolin after reading her beautiful letter?

I wonder, too, whether you will manage to resist the gorgeous temptation of all those carpets... I hope and suspect that you won't! Mum couldn't, and although the whole thing was a bit of a hassle, she takes pleasure in the rightness, romance and memory of those long, blood-red runners in the hall, each day. I believe she even showed them off to you, when you first met - is that right?

I would love to see Turkey, some day. I hope you are loving it. It really makes me happy to think of you there. There, and all these places you've been writing about. I feel calmer thinking of you wandering strange towns - with your boy, in your hats, with your supplies of unintelligible foreign packets - than I do when I think of you safe in your office in a shirt and tie.... Hmmm. Yes, sounds just like a reflection of my biases, doesn't it? But I feel it, too. Does this visit make you want to travel for longer in Europe? Rent a house somewhere exotic for a few months, write and play and take photos and drink wine in the sun with eccentric locals, take weekend trips to new countries, hire bikes, boats, cars... Hmmmm.... For THAT sort of adventure you need a lover. ;)

Time is running out, now, isn't it? It seems to have passed very quickly... Since your emails started coming through, that is! You mentioned a photo you sent of the view of the sea from the plane, is that right? It didn't come through, for some reason. I look forward to seeing it, when you come home.

It's a blue, blue day, today, chilly but sunny. I walked Frannie's dog with my aunt, this afternoon, and there was a rainbow. Rainbows will never again appear without our thinking of Frannie, now. That's quite a nice thought to have.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing you. But a part of me is sorry at the prospect of ending our second email correspondence. I like us in writing. I like us in person, too - more, mostly - except that in person we seem always to be barrelling towards some dénouement, never still, rarely able to exist as ourselves in the given moment. Ironically, in writing, traveling different courses at our different paces and under different skies, the 'us' of us is still. Alive, but refreshingly not kicking!

Perhaps this is our secret. We are destined to be lovers across town, lovers across the globe....

.... Well, bollocks to that, I say.

Jessie and I have just finished watching an episode of Boston Legal on DVD. I always begin by wondering why I bother with this crass show, and in the space of one episode am caught in its quirky, clever and unexpectedly humane spell again.

And, oh, we ate well, tonight, too. A new invention (born of the usual proverbial parent): Quinotto! Which is what risotto becomes when it comes time to add the arborio rice and Moss opens the pantry to find only quinoa!
Could have been a disaster, so the gods must take some credit on account of their mercy. But I followed a hunch that it would work, and used my instincts (fine-tuned as they are) as to the pace of the cooking and the receptiveness of the grain. Mmmmm-mm. It was seriously good, the onions caramelised themselves in the process, my half-half of red and white grains combined with a beetroot-heavy stock gave it a wonderful hue, and then I topped it with my trademark shiitakes and buttery spinach and - yessiree - goats' cheese.

Can you tell I'm trying to lure you back from Istanbul?

Tomorrow I have the day open for studio time. I really need to use it well. I have some slowly escalating jitters, doubts about the collection, and time is running short, again... But these are the times when I am most purposeful, most assured that the space I inhabit on the planet is not wasted on me, even when I'm struggling. It's a struggle born of longing, an intuition of some glorious possibility; a struggle towards, and not away.

That said, a less lofty longing that also compels me is the thought of a well-earned rest. I still don't feel I've earned it, but if the show is to come together by its scheduled date, well, by golly, I will have earned it by then!

Added to this are the peculiar and unexpected pressures this year has brought with it. The longing for rest was sown earlier and far deeper than usual, this time, and the promise of time to simply be, to find some kind of equilibrium again, is wonderful.

So, with that I'll bid you goodnight, reach my hand up through the chill air to the light switch, wriggle deeper into my doona and wrap myself around my fading heat pack. Miss you.

Moss
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Letter to Lewis

Hello, my little love.

I am on the tram on my way to the op shop, for the start of another long Wednesday.

My afternoon in the studio went well, and I wish I could be in there today. The collection is looking good, I think, and full of interest (I hope!). But I still feel I have a lot to do. Some clincher, something that really brings it all together. What struck me in my uncle's work the other night was a sort of internal glow and a near-magical surface energy afforded by a shimmer of tiny silver lines across blackest-black ground. I'm still struggling with my blacks. I could have them easily with soft pastel, but I'm determined to achieve them with ink. I don't know why. I query it often in myself - I don't think it's mere stubbornness. But it's nonetheless important that the quality of my drawings does not suffer because of it.

Anyway. I am used to my uncle's surface magic. He has perfected it over decades. But this drawing, a small female head, untypically intimate, caught as though in motion, was devastatingly beautiful. It's the first drawing of my uncle's that I've strongly wanted to own. And my own drawing has such a long way to go!
Tomorrow, his latest show opens.
I am hoping that the confrontation with the rest of his collection doesn't dismay me too much!

That said, I was pleased to find, on returning to the studio yesterday, that my work still looks good. And I actually appreciate the gentle kick in the pants as far as craftsmanship goes. Finer, more careful, more beautiful. This collection is more symbolic than previous shows of mine, and I need to be careful that that doesn't dominate. Symbolism only goes so far. Beauty goes everywhere.

And what of you and your work? I can imagine the situation is quite alarming. Are you worried, frightened?

I have to confess that, being the romantic that I am, I felt a real thrill for you when I read that you might be getting 'the boot'. Imagine! The freedom! Suddenly everything is possible. And to learn this while at large, in Paris, experiencing the enormous, sprawling generosity of the world! Is there any part of you that thrills, too, or does the mortgage weigh heavily, even on a train that flies along through Europe like a shufflepuck?

I am now at Journal Cafe, with a class ahead of me that I have been creating in my head all day. I'm unusually nervous. I don't often feel this way, anymore.

I wish, dear, fickle man of terrors - on whose shifting mind I know not how my words fall - I wish that my night had you at the end of it.

You and your anxious energy, you and your chiminea sending sparks into the night, you and your strong arms, you and your soft mouth, you and your thoughts, you and your boy body and rumpled bed.

There.

No use in my pretending or justifying or second-guessing. That's how it is tonight: I miss you and my long body longs for you.

LATER:
Home now. I taught the class with gusto, humour and emphatic authority - the only chance I had at keeping their attention through a class on linear perspective. I don't always manage to sustain that bravado but I did tonight, and I felt wonderful.

On that note, faraway boy, goodnight.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (since you used up the last lot in one go)

To bed now goes your sleepy, warm and tingling girl, sending her love through the night to your daytime...

M.

Love from the Thick of It

12.5.10
Hey there, my favourite New Yorker.
How is it all going? Don't spare me: I want the goss: the course, the unavailable Brooklyn babe, any other crushes and conquests, any philosophical moments or shining Springtime revelations, walks, new City discoveries.... Tell me. Your best friend misses you.

A cute thing: Jessie confessed the other day that she has several times caught herself marvelling at how well your flowers have kept, given that they came all the way from New York. ;) Love her.

Frannie's funeral was yesterday. It had been delayed by the grim wait for her autopsy, quarantine clearance, and repatriation. The notion of her perfect, smooth olive body being cut open is a horror that has only been acknowledged between us with wordless widening of the eyes and contractions of the brow. I don't doubt that it has dwelt painfully in everyone's mind as it did in mine. She took almost two weeks to come home.

14.5.10
The funeral was a very big affair. There were some 800 mourners and supporters in attendance, packing the church and its hall as well.

Although Frannie's death was central to the occasion, it remained often an elusive concept, descending on the mind in its fulness only fleetingly, and only a small handful of times. This phenomenon has fascinated me (along with the fact that, in this terrible time, curiosity and fascination have not abandoned me). I have probably talked too often of it to people, partly out of my own amazement, and partly by way of explanation for my ability, still, to function almost normally. It is as if one is permitted a tiny dose of grief each day, which takes hold and plays out according to its moment and one's strength in that moment, and then it is gone completely. Sometimes I even wish to recall it. Sometimes an uncontrollable passion of tears brings such a feeling of release that I seek to dwell in the undiluted knowledge of what has happened for a little longer, but it is as though a door has closed and I simply cannot access that pain by the same means as before. I must wait for a new combination of stimuli: a new formulation of the facts to cut me afresh.
I realise this is how such a thing can be endured, and I try to accept and be patient with the natural, protective rhythm of my brain. Perhaps, by this regime of small cuts and low doses, I will gradually build a tolerance to the pain of what has happened.

So, the funeral was like that. 800 people taking their pain in small doses and at different moments throughout the day. It isn't just a defensive mechanism of the individual, either. It plays out collectively, too. There is never a moment where everyone suffers intolerably at once. There is always a stronger party to hold up the ones who are momentarily stripped of their own resources.

I don't know how anyone could do this alone. I have never in my life been so consciously grateful for the loving strength of our family.

We are taking it in turns to be with Frannie's immediate family. Jessie is staying there tonight, and I am staying tomorrow night. Mum has been down most of the week, only returning this weekend to look after her mum, as she does every weekend.

Nanna Moss has not been told of the death of her granddaughter. It has been an ongoing dilemma, and I feel quite strongly that she should be told... But I think there is sense in the decision not to tell her at this time, when it may destabilize her enough to double the already extreme burden of care for her children to bear.

It is a sad but convenient probability that although Nanna Moss would recall Francesca's name and person immediately were she to walk into the room, the deterioration of her memory is such that she might never notice her absence.

Life in all its richness and complexity is laid bare at this time, and it is, while difficult, so interesting.

In my confidence that your life is going along as richly as it was when we last spoke, I hope with all my heart that you are blessed with a similar clarity and acuteness in your perception of your world right now. It does me good to think of you boldly living out your long-held dream and being surprised by all the details you could never have imagined accurately, and reassured by those you did.

Do write and tell me, when you have some time.

I miss you all the time, but I am so very glad you are in New York, which feels to me also like a treasured friend. I trust you are looking after each other.

I'll write again soon and tell you more about this very absorbing, draining, enriching, sad time.

With my love in a big hug -
Moss xxxxx

Ghosts of Autumns Past

Letter to Michelle

Oh, my dear Shell.
It has been a strange and difficult time, indeed, but much worse than merely fretting about getting work done. Sadly, it will even affect you.

Yes, I have been fretting about my show. As always, I have left the main body of work to be born under the panic of an impending deadline. But that has been a sort of wonderful feeling.

Let me back-track...

You know that I went to New York to try to get over Lewis. To remind myself that the world is large, colorful, magical, and that, within it, I can command my own happiness.

It was a really good reminder, and I returned strong, independent, happy... And still in love with that gorgeous boy.

Wondrously, a week after my return, Lewis sent me a most beautiful gift: a slideshow of his photographs of curled leaves (a curious and terribly touching passion of his) set to Joan Armatrading's 'Dry Land'. I'm going to assume you know the song.

It meant a huge amount to me. It was a momentous feeling, sitting late at night, alone in my room, watching these leaves curled up like lovers, and hearing these words of glad surrender, after many journeys and storms, to love, to safety. To me!!

I can't say there were not some warning bells. Lewis's sending such a powerful, unambiguous message might cause a panic of doubt and regret in him. Might scare him out of his wits.
So, imagine my feelings when I went to have dinner with him and he told me, "Moss, I have fallen ridiculously in love with you".

A curious, mitigating detail here is that he was cooking at the time, had his head in the fridge, and addressed these longed-for words to the cheese compartment.

But it mattered little. I was in bliss. I had not misread his beautiful gift. He had not back-pedaled as I had expected him to. He was ridiculously in love with me.


Ridiculously.

The back-pedaling happened in slow-motion.

"I want to ask you if we can be together...
... But not talk about having kids...
...And not talk about forever, for a while."

But that's where we were at, before! That's what had been so hard. Had nothing shifted in him, even a little, with this tremendous romantic revelation of his?
Some softening, some tiny venture into perhapses?

I surprised myself by saying a firm "no".
In retrospect, I understood his proposition as he had intended it: could we try being together as we should have been from the start - try falling in love without all those big, insurmountable hurdles he
had installed, so prematurely, in our path?

A part of me still sees the appeal of this idea. But I know it could only be a fantasy. So I told him to come up with something better, or let me go, properly.

We spent the following weekend together. It was beautiful. Loving, close, free and real. We were like we should always have been. But by the end of it, we had no solution to our problem, still, so we agreed, instead, to stop contact, at least for a while. He wanted to start counseling, sort out his head, his heart, his fears, his past. It seemed wisest for him to do this alone, and without keeping me waiting.

But of course, I have been waiting. He'd said he was in love with me!

I was not miserable. I had an idea and a plan. All my sorrow, all my confusion and loneliness and loss, I would channel towards my show. I would work hard. I HAVE worked hard. No matter that my studio suddenly became unavailable. I found a new one. Part of a big old factory. It needed a good work surface: I built a wall in one day! First-ever experiment with a power-drill.
The factory belongs to my Dad's youngest brother and his wife.
There's a fig tree outside it. I ate figs warmed by the Autumn sun and worked hard. I knew I had only one way to communicate with Lewis without breaking our rule of silence. I knew he would come to my show. The exhibition would have to say everything. It would be the most beautiful love letter I've ever conceived. And there was not a single moment to be lost.

At this, of all times! I have to work full time at the shop for a fortnight, to compensate for my trip to New York. Plus teaching. It doesn't matter. I am wonder woman, fueled by love and sadness and
hope. Hope hope hope.

I have felt so full of sunshine, Michelle, pedaling every spare day to the Brunswick studio, donning my apron. I am every great woman artist. I am every literary heroine who has been patient with love. I am
living the story. Making magic out of my troubled heart.

You get the picture?

On Wednesday, I had a phone call from the director of my gallery.

They are in financial difficulty, and are closing. Before my show can open.

("Not to worry - we plan to merge, resurface elsewhere in a slightly different form, we will honour our commitment to you. Your show may be pushed back as little as three weeks! We'll keep you posted".)

Michelle, I'm so sorry. You are one of four friends to have booked flights from interstate for this. I can't tell you how much it means that you would come all the way to see my show. But I will give you a special studio preview. We'll make it even better than the opening would have been, okay?

In terms of my love letter... I went to pieces. May 26th had been burnt on my brain as the night my fortunes would change. Lewis would come to the opening, see, understand. He would love me and realise I was far too extraordinary to let go. We would never part again!

Yes, a small part of me is precisely this silly.

Ironically, my show is to be called 'What Remains to Keep' ... my idea was to focus on the parts of happiness that remain in one's keeping, from small keepsakes and souvenirs of love and travel, for instance, to changes in one's spirit that become lifelong gifts, even when their
source is gone.

The theme first took shape months ago, when I was grappling with Lewis's fear of losing his freedom; my own wish to 'keep' him, and to be kept; and my belief that real freedom lies in love.

'To have and to hold' - in my mind such beautiful, wondrous privileges - can mean, to one such as Lewis, 'to possess and to entrap.' How does one reconcile these things?

It's an awkward, tangled, elusive train of thought. But it was coming to my drawings in simpler terms, quite independently of my conscious design.

But old lady Universe has picked up on the theme, it seems, and wants to see 'what remains to keep' when there is no lover, no hope, no gallery. She's very clever. She's asking me what I'm made of, I think.

I felt utterly devastated about the gallery. I cried all the tears I had not cried over Lewis. I was inconsolable. Dad was there. I sobbed into my pillow and he put his silky, shaggy head on my back and said, 'Oh, dear'. I don't think he could have said anything more helpful. I loved him for being powerless with me. It's only a postponement, Michelle. But it burst open the foolishness of my secret hopes. I felt resourceless, silenced, purposeless.

I wrote to Lewis and asked him directly whether I could have any hope for us, whether he did.

He does not, came his reply last night (clearly, firmly, thoughtfully written) and neither should I.

Michelle, I have never cried so many tears as I have in the last week, and never felt so profoundly directionless as I did last night. My beautiful sister took me home, put me in the shower, made my bed with fresh sheets, and lay stroking my head until I went to sleep. I was terrified of the morning.

But today is a new day, and I find myself remarkably purposeful.

Lewis called just now to mumble general apologies for failing me, told me counseling was going well, and that he's finally booked his ticket for that holiday he's been afraid to take for so long.
He flies out...

On
the
26th
of
May.

He was not even going to be there.

So, Michelle, I have dried my tears and am rolling up my sleeves because there is not a moment to lose: I have a show coming up, someday, somewhere, and it must be exceptionally good and worthy,
because it's an open love letter to the Universe at large...

... and to myself.

Crash

Letter to my family from New York:

Tonight, darlings, I am homesick.
The old Moss would have a good cry about now, and indeed, some tears are lurking ominously behind my eyes. But grown up Moss dusts herself off (after all, she's almost thirty!) and will get on with being happy and taking everything in her long, purposeful stride.

I knew tonight would feel like this - which raises some question of self-fulfilling prophecy, but I also had reason to predict this feeling of fierce humiliation.

Lena is so amazingly generous and well-meaning. She gave me perfume for valentine's day, all wrapped up, and leaves food in the fridge, buys me clothes, gives me vouchers, etc., etc.

I can't repay her and I wish there was not such a great feeling of imbalance.

I wish she would stop.

I have been anticipating tonight with dread. Lena had gone to great lengths to track down a contact - a gallery director - and invited her to come and meet me - Lena's protege - and to bring her artist husband, who has been featured at the Venice Biennale and of whom, of course, I know nothing.

Oh, mortification! I knew I had very little to show. I did not come equipped for this - I'm not here for this purpose. And I see how conservative my work can seem to someone who is very active in the contemporary scene, especially when it's in reproduction and the texture and inherent energy of the process, the spirit in it, are not evident. And I well know by now that I can't talk the talk unless it's sincere.

I can't bluff.

Carla turned out to be a delightful person, beautiful and barely older than me. Her husband was equally generous and warm. They are velvety-accented Italians - both wore black. Picture him: affable, fashionably ungroomed and yet somehow faultless, and sporting a motorcycle jacket; and her: dark-eyed, in an elegant blur of shoulder-skimming black angora. Their effortless style heightened my awareness of the inexpertly-concealed shiner of a pimple on my cheek.

They regarded me with gentle openness. I suppose that is better than downright dismissal or contempt, but as the evening wore on; as they, bright-eyed, mentioned celebrated contemporary artists I ought to know, trying to establish common ground, and I, squirming, shook my head, smiled, looked fascinated and felt ashamed; as Carla looked through my masters book - which now seems so old and childish! - and asked me who my influences were (I drew a panicked blank!); as she smiled so graciously and offered advice and I felt too-tall and frightfully naiive; as Lena, in a vintage chiffon apron and totteringly high heels, offered around expensive sashimi on a tray; as, at Lena's prompting, I opened my cherished little folio of the few darling sketches I've made here, and suddenly found them shabby; as Francesco, deep in conversation with Lena's husband, absently stepped backwards onto my portrait of Joe; as I smiled and nodded and smiled and nodded and stuttered and squawked my unrehearsed explanations of my work; I thought, "I'm in excruciating pain!"

Why have I not learnt to do this? Why do I still feel worthless when confronted with such people? I thought I would be better. I am so much better at coping with so many things than I was before - all sorts of things! But not this. I kept imagining this fabulously hip couple leaving, and the things they would say to each other , "thank God that's over!" "well, she was very sweet" (I was), "poor thing", "what was Lena thinking?", etc.

I wasn't hopeless - I was charming, well-behaved, humble and open. I did the best I could. But I felt like ZERO, and it probably showed.

And It's not just embarrassment and shame, either. I feel violated. I didn't want this, I didn't ask for it. I have felt such joy and pride in my  little drawings, these last days. It is horrible to see them through these eyes, now. Can I recover my pleasure in them enough to continue drawing, tomorrow?

I don't know what goes on in me. I don't understand where it comes from, why I so readily feel like a child before someone who is successful and self-possessed and 32.  

Perhaps it is the contrivance of this situation. It wasn't my plan, I had no control of matters at all. I wanted to make Carla understand - via mental telepathy and urgent meaningful glances - that it was not I who contrived this meeting, it was not I who had too-high aspirations for myself, not I who did not understand that her sort of gallery is not for my sort of artist. I felt so certain I would disappoint everyone present - waste the time of the guests, and lose Lena's admiration for my work through their dismissal of it. I wasn't stubbornly negative, I just honestly feared it.

Oh, my people, I miss you. I want to scuttle home with my tail between my legs and be loved.

I have been so triumphant, here, till now!

And now, picture me: still all dressed up, but with muddled mascara (yes, I broke) on the sitting-room couch, one stockinged foot on the coffee table, next to one of Lena's Vogue magazines (this month, "Love, Sex and What To Wear").
Opposite me is my uncle's majestic drawing of swans in their rich black rectangle, dominating the wall. The warp of the perspex reflects me: distorted, tiny, and squashed in the lower left corner.

I believe I will one day find all this very funny. Some little part of me already does.

Today I had a date with a man named Jeff. The pain au chocolat man. He invited me to come along to a talk he was giving on board the USS Intrepid Aircraft Carrier, which is set up as a museum. I thought of you so much, Dad! Did you go there? I imagined you would love it. Jeff was impressive, energetic, thoroughly American, charming. He bought me lunch at his favourite Chelsea diner and showed me the amazing, snow-blurred view from his Greenwich Village apartment. My heart did not so much as flutter for a second. I artfully dodged when I saw he wanted to kiss me, but it was nice to have someone to talk to.

I am doing everything I came here to do, and more. New York has exceeded all my expectations. But the thread to home has stretched to snapping-point, and tonight I feel suddenly adrift on an island countless miles away from all that makes my life meaningful.

Most of that is you.

Love, Moss
xxx

Obstacles

Best Laid Plans

(letter to my family from New York)

Hello, again, my beloveds: Happy Valentine's Day.

Having failed to get a table at the gorgeous little vegie Thai place Sara and I enjoyed last week, I've stumbled upon quite a different scene, a block east of the apartment, in St. Mark's Place. It's called Yaffa Cafe, has apparently been here for decades, and is open 24/7. It's set several steps below street level, and glows darkly red with the hundreds of novelty lanterns lining the walls and low ceiling. It's deep, narrow, bustling, and not remotely like the sohisticated, clean-lined, white Pukk restaurant at which I had planned to eat!

I'm actually glad the other place was full - I've been there already, after all! And this is certainly an experience.

It's clearly popular. If it were in Melbourne, it'd be in Brunswick Street... And yet... Everything seems amplified, here in New York. Bigger, wilder, more beautiful, often. And that's how this place compares with anything on Brunswick street. It's off the Brunswick Street radar!

I've just finished my Spinach and Brie crepe, and my glass of Prosecco. The table has been cleared and its red holographic laminex surface winks at me.

I had planned to eat in. But that'd be copping out, on Valentine's day, wouldn't it? So I climbed back out of the track pants I'd so gladly climbed into only an hour before, dolled myself up to the nines, and stepped out for a romantic evening on my own!

I'm learning that courage pays off.

I went to church again, this morning - it occurred to me that it should be okay to participate in church without being a committed Christian. Here it seems okay. Each time I've been, there's been a welcome to anyone who is visiting, and both times, the charismatic, young, female minister has said, "wherever you may be on your personal journey, we are honoured to have you here".

I've enjoyed both services - especially  the sermons, which I feel permitted to interpret as poetically as I like. It is such a novel thing: to enjoy church without feeling I must join the club!

Still, after the service, I swallowed my natural diffidence, lingered for coffee and enjoyed chatting to people.

Afterwards, I was sidetracked from my intended drawing afternoon by a wander through the 9th Street shops. There really are wonders to be found, here. A toy shop confronted me with an exquisite mobile of five captivating hot air balloons. They look like something from a period movie about an era where toys seemed magical and didn't require batteries. I am tempted. I'll see how my budget holds out.

And then an amazing clothes shop... Which I'll tell you about at present-giving time! ;)

Despite all these delights, and the gleaming day, my conscience was beating me round the head about my neglected drawing... So I went home, picked up my kit and plucked up my courage, and went to a diner on Second Avenue, wriggled my way into a corner table and drew what I could see outside.

It's only my second cafe drawing, here - it's too cold to work outside - and both times I've found the same thing: I can't sit where I can see what I planned to draw, so I must look at what's offered - which generally appears plain and unromantic - and find something within it to interest me. Last time it was the bra-strap visible under the teeshirt of the girl who blocked my view, and the Venetian blinds that all but finished the job. This time it was the graffiti on the New York fire hydrant on the sidewalk in front of me. Isn't it funny? I've ended up aproaching my New York drawings, by default, in the way I deliberately approach my work at home - by trying to find wonder in ordinariness.

Well, I've finished my chocolate soufflé, and perhaps I'd best free up this table for some Valentine's day sweethearts. The tattoed lovers to my right have gone, but the French trio to my left are still in earnest conversation. I don't understand a single word, but it occurs to me that I always assume, when I hear French people talking, that they are debating the comparitive virtues of the great philosophers.

On that note,

Bonne Nuit!(and all my love)

xxx

P.S. Went to the Frick yesterday, Mum: amazing! Loved the Vermeers especially. x

Release

Catch

Open

To Have and To Hold

It feels good to be productive, again.

Perhaps because of the heat, and these long, open days, I'm reminded of last year's swimming at Bittangabee Bay. It presents a good analogy for my experience of a return to drawing.

I remember the first time I went to the cove on my own, before breakfast, and dawdled almost endlessly on the rocks, staring into the cold, ominous taunt of the lapping water. Ghastly fish remains - the careless debris of many holiday fishermen - littered the shallows in some places, and the deep threatened horrors. The whole enterprise became so unappealing that it was only pride, in the end, that forced me into the water.

Splash!

There can be nothing half-hearted, once you're in.

The shock of the cold caught my breath and my head reeled with instinctive panic. And then it was calm. No rearing sharks. An expanse of glittering morning water, and just me in it. The solitary plosh-plosh of my inexpert stroke announced to the silence my passage to the beach and return to the rocks.

After that, all the time we were camping, the cove whose waters had frightened me so much, now beckoned irresistibly every day.

***

I sent Lewis a Dorothy Porter poem, yesterday, and he surprised me, some hours later, by composing a poem of his own, in reply. So, I wrote one for him, late last night, and it was such a pleasure to play with words like that, again. I'm generally a little timid of writing poetry, but it's okay for an audience of one.

A theme to emerge in my poem - oddly it wasn't conscious - was the compulsion to have and to hold, to grasp and keep and present as proof. It's been haunting my drawing, with the jars... and it's inherent in the Lewis problem, too: though I can't quite pin down the thought (there I go again, pinning down!). But it's something about keeping and not keeping, and what worth I attribute to the joy of something when I can't keep it forever. I suppose I'm flitting around the notion of non-attachment.

I can rejoice in the secret wonder resulting from my failure to capture yesterday's blue-tongue lizard on camera. It makes the experience more intimate, more wholly my own... as though the very letting go allowed me to keep what was most precious. But my feelings on the whole are quite different when it comes to letting go of Lewis.

Does that sound ridiculous? To compare my love with a lizard!

But my mind insists on making a philosophical link between these two so disparate instances of joy and loss.

Can I reach a state of mind whereby it is possible to love and let go, serenely?

I don't even know if it's desirable. I have always prized passion and, in terms of love, to have and to hold are long-cherished hopes of mine. Perhaps the key lies somewhere in the question of what part of loving, what part of happiness, is one's own to keep. 

Ah... words confuse me further. I shall return to my drawing, and pay closer attention to the teachings of the little jar.

small jar

Tongues

For Lewis, Summer 2010 

While our eyes are cast down to our toes
Look!
The last being I expected on Earth
A lizard, basking on my urban path.

This prehistoric shape
in panic
scramble-slides across the tarmac
flashing a blue tongue.

Little wonder
I've known your name from childhood!
And yet
abandoning formalities, I say:
Hello! Little Darling One - wait!
searching in my burden for
the means to grasp this gift
with light

(beep

click)

I never get that far.
I sacrifice a last glimpse of weird tail
in the scramble-panic fumble
for my camera

gone

there is joy and worry
that this great event
will go unproven 

I'll go with joy. 

It's wheels and pedals again
until
a thousand red tongues
halt my course

(the breeze vanishes as I stop,
stoop in the thick air
loopy girl, looking at leaves)

There is always a just-right one.

Today, a tiny, scarlet wedding ring
- dust, should I grasp too hard -
pleases me enough
to cycle on

pretending my joy
is owed to irony.

search and rescue

Last night I dreamt of a large gathering of family and friends in the country. We were staying several days in a big ranch-style house. The landscape was open, brown like goldfields country, and quite wild. There was a large, dangerous-seeming, brown river a short walk from the house, and in this river much of my dream was set.

Part of the family-fun was a competition of sorts; we were each to create a sculpture or some sort of piece out of the things we had found. This seemed to be an annual challenge - a well-loved tradition - and throughout the dream it seemed to absorb those around me. I had won the competition previously, and felt that people expected another triumph of me.

I wanted to make this thing, but there were crises at hand that prevented my even beginning it... even as I write that, I realise that all my passions in the dream were focused on the central crisis, and all that is connected with my found-objects creation is a sense of panic, dread, shame, and the frustration of disparate pieces that would not come together.

All my attention was centred on my bunny-rabbit - a small, dark creature who had fallen in the river and, I feared, might be dead. Notwithstanding this fear, I daily walked past all the busy and productive people dotted industriously throughout the landscape, and jumped in the river, fully clothed, to look for my bunny. I didn't want to fail him. The worst thought was that he would perish alone, thinking that I didn't care. 

People were playing in the river: water-skiing, making noise and disturbing the surface of the water. I remember my uncle, the artist, watching me from atop an escarpment above the river. I remember banging the screen door behind me as I left the ranch on the third day, and realising I had still not changed out of my jumper and jeans and had on the same underwear, despite their being soaked, daily. I was particularly aware of the cumbersome nature of the clothing for swimming in - the jumper a heavy, rainbow, hand-knitted affair - but it did not occur to me to take it off. 

At moments I had glimpsed my bunny but had been unable to reach him. 

On the third day, I found him, under a drain but not yet sucked down the hole - just inches away from certain death, shivering and drenched. I reached and took his little body in my hands. There was a panic and a struggle during which he nearly went down the drain - I had to grab at him roughly, and worried that I would hurt him, but finally he was safely in my arms, grateful. I held him against my chest and we chatted softly like lovers all the way back to the ranch.


It's time I got some drawing done.


My dream has reminded me that I need to find my poor, beloved little wild creature again, and nurture it. I have been dangerously, wilfully neglecting it. So! On with the rainbow jumper, and into the murky water go I...